1-2 Money
QUESTION6.com
We,The People, are not happy
Money! Money! Money!
All the people around the world have the same concern: Money! It will stay with you all your life, like gravity, independently of race, religion or sex preference. Money is a system of measurement… with something human added to it…. And that creates problems.
When mechanics want to be precise, they use microns. The astronomer uses light years. To measure heat, we use thermometers. To measure weight, we use a scale. To measure radioactivity, we use a Geiger counter. The system we use does not change what we are measuring. To measure the value of something… it is different. We can use money, but money introduces something human in the measurement. The value of an object is how much somebody is willing to pay for it. The value of a painting, at an auction, is decided by the audience. It will drop if an expert decides that it is a copy. There is something human in money that we cannot find in other systems of measurement. We are at the junction of the body and the soul.
Money was designed to help people exchange objects of the same value. This is a simple use that should not create any problem, but something went wrong somewhere.
Here is an example. When taking a $300 000 loan to buy a house with a 30-year mortgage at 6%, we will repay the principal of $300 000 plus a total of $347 515 in interest. To buy our home, we must also buy one for the banker! That was not our intention.
Politicians make waves. Money makes the tide.
We spend our lives paying off debts. This includes car loans, student loans, mortgages, bank loans, credit cards, and even the national debt. With each loan, we lose some freedom.
Most of the wealth we create goes to the lenders. The system shifts wealth from the workers to the wealthy. Politicians keep arguing over who should pay taxes. That will remain a minor issue as long as the financial system is still unchanged. It is getting to the point where governments do not even try to repay their debts. They consider paying the interest to be an achievement.
It started as a good idea.
Money was created to ease the exchange of goods and services of equal value. Finding someone willing to trade fish for piano lessons is not easy. There was a need for an interface that keeps its value. Our ancestors tried to use salt, shells, and animal skins. They used steer hides and called it ‘a buck’. The best solution they could find was gold and silver.
That was an improvement, but we wanted to do even better. Why should we keep digging gold out of the mines if we are going to put it back in the cave of a bank? It was easier to print paper. We replaced gold with paper and trust. The more money the governments printed, the less trust people had in their fiat currency. We did not stop there. Printed paper was replaced with electrical impulses sent through cables. Today, we don’t even need cables. All what remains is faith.
Money, like many other human creations, was polluted by human nature. Today, money controls our lives. It controls the house we live in, the car we drive, the education we receive, the people we meet, what we eat, and even who has a shot at getting elected. The servant became the master.
The problem got even worse when we created loans with interest. It is an attempt to associate money and time. You can associate money with hard work to produce goods and services. However, you can’t put money in a safe and expect it to be there plus interest, next year. Money and time alone don’t mix.
People should be able to exchange their work for money and their money for goods and services without incurring debt. They should be able to live in a society without national debt. Something is wrong and there is no obvious solution.
An Alien looking at planet Earth through his telescope would see 8 billion individuals moving around like ants. He may be wondering what the cause of all this animation could be. We need food and shelter. That does not explain everything. A couple of centuries ago, approximately 85% of the population was comprised of farmers. Today, they represent less than 5% of the population. We should be free from basic needs 80% of the time. What keeps us so busy?
We have long-term and short-term motivations.
The human body is high maintenance. It must be fed three times a day. It must be kept at the right temperature at all times. It doesn’t smell good unless we keep washing it regularly. We don’t know what happens during our 8 hours of sleep. Even if you spend one hour a day keeping your body in working order, you should have more than 14 hours of leisure per day. Something is missing somewhere.
Behind the short-term motivation of the individual lies the long-term motivation of a society. Civilizations appear and fade away like flowers bloom and wither. We are familiar with the Egyptian civilization, followed by the Greek and Roman cultures. More recently, in the 15th century, Portugal was the leader of Europe. In the 16th century, Spain was the leading power, followed by the Netherlands, France, and England. All those countries seemed to follow the same process. The individuals who lived at the time were not conscious that they served the same purpose. We are not separate individuals. We are a flow of people like a river running across the centuries. We serve a purpose, consciously or not. Something is missing in our understanding of life. Sooner or later, we stop what we are doing and ask ourselves:” What is the purpose of all this? What am I doing here? Is it worth it?” Earth may not be hell, but it is not a paradise either. It looks more like purgatory.
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To answer the question of “What are we doing on Earth?”, some people use religion. Others decided that they will be happy when they have enough money or become famous. We are all looking for love. The problem is that we don’t know where to look. Looking for love cannot be a daily activity.
How is motivation implemented in Nature?
Let’s take a labyrinth.
At first, we sent water to fill the labyrinth. It filled all the dead ends and found its way to the exit. Water is driven by gravity.
The next step is to replace the water with slime mold. It is this gluey thing spreading on dead trees in the forest. It has no head and no brain. However, it is used to improve our computers because it can solve problems faster than we can. The slime mold will fill all the dead ends of the labyrinth. It will also reach the exit. After reaching its goal, the slime mold will remove what is filling the dead ends and could be put to better use elsewhere. Slime mold is motivated by the search for food.
Now, let’s place humans at the entrance of the labyrinth. They are not driven by gravity. They are not looking for food. They lack real motivation. They may not find the exit. Motivation could be the key to success. It lacks shape, color, or weight. You will not find it in the material world. The key to success is in our souls.
Love could be the leading motivation in our lives. Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary sense organs to guide our search. All we know is that we will not find it in money or in the material world. The answer will come from our soul and our motivation.
What is a bank loan?
Banks do not use their own money. They use your money. Making a deposit on your bank account is to make a loan to the bank, without interest, and without guaranty that the bank will be able to reimburse your loan. About 90% of bank’s financing is created out of thin air. The value of the loan you receive cannot be backed by the goods or services you plan to produce in the future. It is based on the money already in circulation. The bank gives you what’s essentially play money and expects to get something of value in return. The system ultimately transfers wealth from those who create goods and services to those who create money.
A bank loan is an exchange of money for the promise that you will spend years working to repay it. It’s an exchange of money for freedom. There is a name for this situation: it’s called “Debt bondage.”
The root of the problem:
We lost our freedom. This is the root of the problem. We wanted to build a society based on individual freedom. We failed! We did not lose a battle against an enemy. It was a failure that we engineered ourselves. It happened gradually, year after year. Today, the cancer has metastasized. It is affecting everybody in every country. All over the world people are waiting for a politician telling them, “You can get back your freedom”.
Imagine a world where money is secondary. The CEO’s primary goal would be to satisfy his customers rather than his shareholders. The pharmaceutical industry would create cheaper, more effective medicines based only on the 250 molecules we really need. Instead of judging people on their bank accounts, we would consider the way they manage their finances for the common good. There’s nothing wrong with making money as long as money does not govern your life.
A better use of money would require a higher level of consciousness
We have a body and a soul. Stealing something makes you a thief, even if no one notices that something is missing. To kill somebody makes you a murderer, even if the police never find you. Stealing money serves the body and is detrimental to the soul. Our way of life makes us focus on the body. The price we pay is the corruption of the soul. We need a financial system that would incorporate the effect that money has on the soul.
We have a good excuse. The body needs food and shelter. This is our priority. The first 1000 we make (of any currency) is used for our survival. The second 1000 is not as useful as the first one and the third even less. Above a certain level, focusing on money becomes a waste of time.
After our death, our body and our belongings get recycled and disappear. What is left of our life on Earth is the changes in our soul. Our main concern should be to move our center of gravity from our body to our soul.
Every year, the countries are sorted by their GDP and their level of happiness. If money is our problem, the two orders should be very similar.
Let’s compare the GDP (The body) with happiness (The soul)
14 From Helena to Robert Check the NDE
GDP per capita
1 Luxembourg
2 Switzerland
3 Ireland
5 Norway
6 Iceland
7 United States
8 Qatar
9 Denmark
10 Netherland
11 Australia
12 San Marino
13 Austria
14 Sweden
15 Belgium
16 Germany
17 Finland
18 Canada
19 Hong Kong
20 Israel
21 United Kingdom
22 France
36 Japan
67 Russia
72 China
143 India
Level of Happiness
1 Finland
2 Denmark
3 Iceland
4 Sweden
5 Israel
6 Netherland
7 Norway
8 Luxembourg
9 Switzerland
10 Australia
11 New Zealand
12 Costa Rica
13 Kuwait
14 Austria
15 Canada
16 Belgium
20 United Kingdom
23 United States
24 Germany
27 France
41 Italy
51 Japan
59 China
72 Russia
126 India
There is worse:
The banks charge interest for the time we keep them waiting. Where can people find the money to pay interest? They cannot print banknotes. They cannot create money out of thin air as banks do. They could give the banker some of the goods and services they produce, but the banker does not want fish or piano lessons. He wants money. Everybody else is in the same predicament. Everyone is looking for money to pay interest.
The banks have a solution: They issue more loans to new customers. This is their way to increase the money supply that existing customers can use to pay their interest. If, someday, people stop applying for loans, banks will not receive interest payments, and the entire system will collapse. Our banking system is a Ponzi scheme. It will not last forever.
As long as money is only used to ease the exchange of goods and services of the same value, we can use salt or bucks or silver and gold. The problem starts when we use money to create debts with interest. Time should not be treated as a commodity. The price we pay for this mistake is a loss of freedom.
Debts feed on freedom
It is possible to avoid debts.
Some systems have been tested successfully. It is possible to finance businesses without creating debts.
- In the UK, the London Community Housing Cooperative is a prime illustration of how residents can come together to create affordable housing solutions. They proved the potential of community-based financing to solve social issues without incurring debts.
-Crowd funding is pooling small contributions from many people. This enables individuals and groups to finance projects without the burden of traditional debt.
-Also in the UK, Crowdfunding created the crowdfunding platform Seedrs, which allows investors to back cooperative businesses such as the Bristol Energy Cooperative. They successfully raised funds through community shares to set up a renewable energy project, thereby avoiding debt.
https://europe.republic.com/businesses/seedrs
-Cooperatives prioritize the welfare of their members over profit. One notable case is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which has grown into one of the largest cooperatives in the world. Founded in 1956, it operates in various sectors, including manufacturing and retail, and has successfully created thousands of jobs while fostering a sense of community among its members.
-In the US, the Organic Valley cooperative united 1800 farmers and created a marketplace for organic dairy products.
Financiers will say that these are only examples of ‘lab testing’ that never made it to ‘mass production’. However, these tests prove that there is a way out of debt bondage. It can be done!
The Future of Debt-Free Financing
The basic idea is simple. Money should not be associated with time. It should only be used to help the exchange of items of the same value.
The first step is to realize that today’s financing system runs counter to nature and is doomed. The payment of old debts requires the creation of new debts. The end result is always the same. The currency depreciates and becomes worthless. The next step will require a Debt-Free Mindset. The main difficulty will not be learning a new system but forgetting the old one.
Our financial industry followed the path of least resistance. It is easier to abuse money than to create the necessary tools. Medicine created X-rays, vaccines, and MRI. The dentists made their own tools. Plumbers, teachers, and every profession had to create their own tools. There should be no exception. The financial system must create its own tools instead of abusing everybody’s money. The use of money should be limited to the exchange for goods and services of equal value.
We were born naked. We assume that whatever we can have must be taken from someone else. Our idea of life in society is based on the idea of taking. It has not always been that way. When our ancestors killed a prey, they had more meat than they could eat before it started rotting. They gave some of the meat to others. Their relationship with other members of the group was based on the idea of giving instead of taking.
The problem is that you don’t want to be the only one giving when everybody else is taking advantage of you.
That requires a society where every individual is convinced that he will not survive unless the society survives. We may think that it is pure utopia until we discover that some people are already using money in a different way. They focus on the effect that transactions have on the soul rather than their effect on the bodies. They know that being alone on Earth would not be a paradise. It would be hell.
We want to be free, but we cannot survive alone in the forest. We have to find a compromise between individual freedom and life in society. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Money is our first attempt to reach a compromise. We don’t do everything right the first time.
What was the reaction of your friends when you told them about love? Keep in mind that your friends are in a dark cave, and you don’t even know, yourself, how you got out of that cave.
Fortunately, there is a way out of our predicament. Our consciousness may be limited, but it can be amplified. We have been working on that problem for a long time already. To love people is to be conscious of them. It is more than being mindful of their presence. It is being conscious of their state of mind. You find this between a mother and her baby. She knows why the baby is crying. No need for words and reasoning. She is conscious of what needs to be done. Between adults, you may not know the details of their past, but you are conscious of the influence that their past had on their soul.
You can get some idea of what an increased consciousness is like by talking to people who have gone through a near-death experience. Many of them have new abilities that they kept after this experience. The most common one is that they know what people around them are thinking. Be careful of what you are thinking if you go to one of their meetings. (There is one every month in most big cities.) If you see a big nose, try to think, “What beautiful hair”. You are swimming in increased consciousness. They may be aware of something about you that you forgot. Search ‘Near Death Experience’ and you will find hundreds of people of all ages who have surprising stories. Most of the time, it happened during surgery. This is not something I would recommend! We say that they lost consciousness. I would rather say that they were not conscious of their physical body. Do we need a physical body to be conscious? This is not on my list of sense organs.
What happened to both of us is that we became conscious of one another. After a big hug, there is not much more to talk about. This is what could help your friends.
15- From Robert to Helena – Critical mass
Helena, I keep thinking of what transformed our relationship. The only explanation I could find comes from the atomic bomb! No mathematics. I promise!
Take a small sphere of radioactive material. The energy generated varies with the volume of the sphere (4/3π R³). The energy lost varies with the surface area (4πr²). As you increase the size of the sphere, the volume increases faster than the surface area. You reach a point where there is more energy generated than energy lost. You have an explosion. This is called “the critical mass.”
Are you still there? Something similar could happen to people. As long as they are separated, nothing much happens. It is only when they get together that they can reach a certain “human critical mass”. The problem is that there may not be enough energy between the two of them to reach that point.
The idea is simple but difficult to believe. Look at the people around you. Each one can generate some love, but not enough to elevate himself to another level. Take two of them at random, and most of the time, their total energy is too small to reach the ‘critical mass’.
Let’s see what could be missing in many people. One possibility is that they are still attached to the material world. They cannot detach themselves from their own body. Most people struggle to make the transition from being a separate individual to becoming half of a couple.
Another possibility is a lack of freedom. Love and freedom come together. When I was a teenager, I was saving my money to buy a record player. Thanks to inflation, the price of the record player increased faster than my savings. It was a race I could not win. Soon after I abandoned any hope, a neighbor bought himself a new record player and gave me the old one. It seemed to me that renouncing reaching a goal in a specific way opens the possibility that it can be reached another way. By detaching myself from using my savings, I introduced freedom into the system. That opened new possibilities.
The general idea is that many people are still prisoners in Plato’s cave. The more knowledge they acquire in the material world, the more they become prisoners of that knowledge. It is more difficult for a surgeon to change professions than it is for a blue-collar worker.
Before you dismiss my critical mass as a crazy idea, let me tell you how it can also be found in human history. The homo sapiens have been on Planet Earth for more than 300,000 years. How come nothing much has happened until the last two centuries? How come the steam engine, the planes, GPS, the computers, and AI did not appear 100 000 years ago? The answer could be that humans were dispersed on the surface of the Earth. There was too much distance between them. The invention of agriculture allowed people to move to cities. Over the past 200 years, the population of cities has continued to increase. A computer is composed of millions of simple ideas contributed by millions of different people. The computer made the internet possible, which further enhanced communication between individuals. More and more brains are becoming increasingly interconnected. That should lead to human beings achieving their critical mass and a higher level of consciousness.
Helena, I predict that more and more people will find their puberty of the soul together.
I would go even further. We will become conscious that Homo sapiens is the seventh stage of human evolution. It is not a question of selecting one race or one religion. Dividing the world’s population into countries fighting one another does not make sense. Either the seventh attempt of Homo sapiens will succeed, or they will disappear from the Earth’s surface like the dinosaurs.
Instead of fighting one another, we’d better unite and look for a way to get out of Plato’s cave. The love between two human beings is pointing in the right direction.